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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

I'm a former chef. So I'm just a wee bit gaga over food. I pay attention to recipes, cookbooks, the garden, meals, restaurants and food-related websites. I reminisce about foods we enjoyed years ago in farflung corners of the globe. I love slow food that is rooted in the place and season it hails from. I know a good recipe when I steal one.

I hope, by giving this background, to communicate how impressive was my husband's wildly successful experiment with smoking some of our cherry tomatoes. I was floored, wowwed, bowled over by the end results. The cherry tomatoes, smoked with apple wood chips from our own tree, were still just slightly moist and pliable with a deeply smoky flavor. The natural sweetness of apple wood complemented the concentrated tomato sugars to produce a taste sensation that stunned my mouth. This was clearly something that demanded to be noticed. And notice I did, while giving all credit to my husband.

Yet, frugal soul that I am, I considered all that charcoal that went into producing these very few diminutive treasures, plus a significant amount of his time, and the cost/return analysis didn't look good. So, I set about experimenting. Could I shorten the amount of smoking time needed? I tried putting on a tray of cherry tomatoes after grilling our dinner. After letting them smoke for just over an hour, I put them in my dehydrator to continue drying down somewhat. The results, sampled very early yesterday morning (after my cat woke me with a hairball attack, but I digress), were pretty disappointing. The smoke flavor was too faint to deliver the profundity of the original long-smoked batch. Scratch the quick and easy method.

Having failed to shorten the batch processing time, yesterday I attempted to increase the batch size by stacking several trays up on our grill. If I can't get the product quicker, I'd at least like the most product for my efforts. There's a significant amount of work involved in producing these things. Here's how I spent the middle of yesterday.

Pick and wash a few pounds of cherry tomatoes. While they drain, arrange a few aluminum foil pans on your cold grill to figure out how they're going to fit. You want a significant gap around the edges so that smoke can filter up. If you have enough trays, figure out how you might stack them. Perforate the bottoms of the trays with a metal skewer to help the smoke circulate. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and arrange them cut side up on the trays, as many as will fit without undue crowding. Start the charcoal in the grill, and when it's ready separate it into two piles at opposite ends of the grill. Place the rack on the grill, with the somewhat open spaces where the handles are directly over the piles of hot charcoal. Arrange your filled trays on the grill rack and stack them as best you can, leaving gaps for air circulation. Throw some apple wood chips on the coals and cover the grill with the vents wide open. Check regularly, adding more charcoal and wood chips as needed through the gaps in the rack under the handles. Try not to spill the chips or charcoal on the tomatoes as you add them.

That, anyway, is the setup. My husband is the designated pyromaniac in our marriage and he's on another business trip. So it was just me trying to nurse along the smoldering embers and keep the grill full of apple smoke. I can get a bonfire roaring, but my fire skills are far too rusty for this delicate work. I checked the situation every fifteen minutes - yes, every 15 minutes - and finally called it a day after two and a half hours. This is definitely a high-maintenance way of dealing with the cherry tomato glut.

After just two and a half hours, the cherry tomatoes were still fairly plump and moist. So I consigned them to the dehydrator for an additional three hours, which freed me up to do other things. This gave them the semi-dried texture I wanted; not quite chewy, but packed with concentrated flavor. For dinner I added a handful of them to my quesadilla, along with some of our homemade, homegrown chile salsa. They shine especially brightly when paired with something a little rich, like cheese, cream, or eggs.

My husband thinks we ought to shop these around to local chefs, placing one of these babies on the tongue like a sacrament, and asking, "How much will you pay me for this?" I think he's crazy. First of all, there's no way I'm going to have any amount of these things that I'd be willing to part with. Second of all, if I did, there's no way I'd get paid anything close to what I think they're worth. Given that these little cherry tomatoes end up so much lighter than their original weight, and given the amount of time and effort it takes to get them there, I'd probably want a minimum of $75/pound. And who would ever pay that? But you, dear reader, could make your own. If you've got a grill and some cherry tomatoes, give it a try.

Further: I came up with a homemade smoker that runs on an electric burner rather than on charcoal.

4 comments:

Kate, your mention of this last week inspired me to give it a try yesterday. We started (I say "we" because my hub actually helped do the grilling) with our regular charcoal (real wood stuff) and added some apple branches. I used my San Marzanos, split in half; we also roasted all the red peppers and eggplants we had available. I ended up bringing the SMs inside after they had softened and added them to some big fleshy Brandywines in a pot; cooked these up to soften them, ran through the foodmill and then canned them in small half-pints to act as concentrate for future smoky sauces, like a big winter pot of tortilla soup. Pretty neat trick! But boy a little goes a long way. I did add about a half cup to some ketchup I was making at the same time; nice smoky oomph it added too. So THANKS!

Yes, we use real charcoal too. I wouldn't use those sawdust and chemical chunks for love or money. I was wondering why it hadn't occurred to me to smoke some paste tomatoes, as you so brilliantly did. Then I remembered that my three paste tomatoes haven't been all that productive this year. But it's a great idea for next year. So thanks, El! I really love the ketchup idea, though we don't eat much ketchup. Maybe they'd be good in tomato jam or a garlic-chili sauce.

Thanks for letting me know you liked the idea. Even if it wasn't mine, it's nice to know I'm helping others try it out.

About me

I live on a 2/3 acre homestead in a residential neighborhood. A major goal is to demonstrate how much food a non-expert can produce in my particular climate and hardiness zone, with the soils native to my immediate area. We have gardens of annual and perennial plants, keep laying hens and honey bees, and regularly bite off more than we can chew. Another major goal is to pay off our mortgage as fast as possible. Here I blog about frugality, self-reliance, gardening, cooking and baking, food preservation, practical skills, half-baked experiments, and preparing to thrive in a lower-energy future.